Honour & Other People's Children

Honour & Other People's Children was Helen Garner's follow-up to her immensely successful Monkey Grip: the difficult second album. Apparently she originally intended to write something similar to her first novel (I guess that meant mining her diaries in the same way) but couldn't make it work, so the noven-in-progress was split into two separate novellas. (I always have trouble remembering that Honour is one story and Other People's Children is another.) 

Honour, the novella I prefer, centres around a separated couple and the challenge to their amicable, long-standing relationship when the man wants to marry his new partner. Other People's Children concerns friendship and share-house politics, the breakdown of a friendship between Ruth and Scotty, and a possible new relationship for Scotty with the unattractive Madigan. Unfortunately I found Madigan so unappealing that I had no interest in whether or not he and Scotty would get together.

The autobiographical elements are not difficult to discern, though it seems that Ruth and Scotty both contain elements of Garner herself. Scotty seems closer to Garner in personality, but Ruth is the one with children, to whom childless Scotty is deeply attached and is likely to lose if the household breaks down. There's less meat in these novellas than there is in Monkey Grip, and I don't think Other People's Children entirely succeeds, but even a flawed Helen Garner book is always worth reading.
 

Impossible Creatures

I'm late to the party as far as Katherine Rundell is concerned, but Impossible Creatures is pretty nearly a perfect middle grade fantasy novel and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone. 

Impossible Creatures opens with a bestiary of gorgeous mythological beasts, both traditional and invented by Rundell, and then plunges immediately into a fast-paced adventure with characters relatable and colourful -- Christopher comes from our own world, and is the unwitting heir to a guardianship he knew nothing about, while Mal comes from the walled-off Archipelago, a hidden part of our world where the magical creatures live. Mal herself is another unwitting heir to a weighty legacy. Helping these two young people in their quest are an array of supporting cast, human and not human, but in the end, Christopher and Mal have to reach deep to stop the leaking of magic from the other realm.

This is a novel I wish I'd written myself -- vivid, moving, pacy and magical. It's wonderful stuff.

True Stories

Wow, what a collection! When this hefty brick arrived on the reserve shelf, it was like getting the Fitzroy pool itself delivered, promising hours of bliss to dive in and swim around.

As a Helen Garner devotee, there wasn't much in this volume of forty years of short non-fiction pieces that I hadn't already read -- a handful of reviews, maybe a couple of articles for obscure magazines. But the fact that most of it was familiar didn't detract at all from the pleasure of re-reading it. Garner's prose style is exemplary; her eye is so keen; her intellect is astringent. She can be judgey, but she is also compassionate, and she is very aware of her own flaws. 

There is a grab bag of subjects here -- reviews and portraits, quotidian experiences, bits of diary, newspaper columns, murder and death, relationships and encounters. True Stories is 650 pages long, but every page was a treat to read. I've decided that if I were marooned on a desert island, I could survive without any new books to read as long as I had the collected works of Helen Garner, Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden and Alan Garner to see me through.

The Children's Bach

The Children's Bach (for the longest time I vaguely thought that 'Bach' might refer to a NZ beach shack. But it doesn't.) is a short and exquisitely formed novel, only 160 pages of quite big print, and it was met with great acclaim when it was first published in 1984 (my edition is branded as a Modern Classic). I got great pleasure from recognising the Melbourne setting: Merri Creek, St Georges Rd, Melville Rd, the Fitzroy pool (again).

Having said that, I could see how an impatient reader or someone who likes a clear plot might feel frustrated with this novel. We are presented with an outwardly almost perfect family, and then witness how they crack and buckle under the influence of Dexter's old friend, Elizabeth, her much younger sister Vicki and Elizabeth's musician lover, Philip (musician -- there's your first red flag, ladies). Almost nothing is explicitly stated, almost everything is implied. As Philip advises a young songwriter, 'Don't explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest.'

I think if Garner were writing this novel today, forty years later, she might reconsider the way she writes about Dexter and Athena's child Billy, who seems to be neurodivergent; and she might (or then again, she might not!) reconsider a sexual encounter between a forty year man and a seventeen year old girl, however insouciant the seventeen year old might seem the morning after.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Garner is more of a natural observer than an inventor, but I might talk more about that later.
 

Flames

Robbie Arnott's debut novel, Flames, came to me via a friend's child who studied it for VCE, so this copy is nicely annotated, underlined and highlighted so that I couldn't possibly miss anything significant. My only previous exposure to Arnott's writing was Limberlost, which I absolutely loved, but I didn't realise that that book was a bit of a departure from Arnott's usual magic realist style. It was a wonderful surprise to read a novel set in Tasmania that is shot through with shimmers of the uncanny and the magical; it felt unusual, but at the same time, so right.

Flames switches points of view with each chapter: a fleeing daughter, a dogged son, a tough (female) detective, a mad wombat farmer, and most surprisingly, the spirit of fire itself. Arnott's writing is extraordinary in its lyricism and beauty, but the ideas and the unashamed embrace of magical and supernatural elements are just as powerful. Flames was greeted with superlatives on its publication in 2018, but it's astonishing to note that Arnott has only got better since then. I really need to read the rest of his books, and it's good to know I have some treats in store.

We Didn't Think It Through

WINNER: 2024 MARION ACT Book of the Year, Books for Older Readers
WINNER: 2024 Readings Young Adult Prize
SHORTLISTED: 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature
SHORTLISTED: 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Indigenous Writers' Prize
NOTABLE BOOK: 2024 CBCA Book of the Year, Older Readers
SHORTLISTED: 2024 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Young Adult Literature

Just look at that list of awards! And yet when I picked up a copy from the shelf at the Athenaeum, there were no stickers on it and I was completely unaware that We Didn't Think It Through by Gary Lonesborough was such a lauded novel.

Having read it now, I'm not at all surprised that it's garnered so many plaudits. We Didn't Think It Through takes us into the world and mind of a young First Nations man (Jamie is sixteen) who is teetering on the very edge of becoming lost in the justice system. Impulsive and drifting, Jamie takes part in a fateful car theft and is sent to 'juvie.' He's angry, he's sad, he's resentful, he's lonely. But there's also something thoughtful and tender inside Jamie that a few key relationships can draw out and build upon to turn him from the path he seems set upon following.

Jamie is a totally relatable kid who's been dealt a hard hand by life so far -- taken from his parents, living in a dead end town where First Nations kids aren't given second chances. But he does have some good things on his side: a loving foster family, a caring older brother, a teacher who sees his potential, a friend he makes in juvie, a social worker who takes the time to connect with him over poetry, and parents who are flawed, but do love him. The way ahead may not be easy for Jamie, but by the end of the book, you get the sense that he's going to make it.
 

Monkey Grip

Thirty five years ago I was squatting in a shared flat in a dark Edinburgh winter with a friend from Melbourne when the movie of Monkey Grip came on the TV: sunshine! The Fitzroy pool! Melbourne! We cried from homesickness.

When I first read Helen Garner's debut novel I felt all at sea. Despite sharing some elements of the Melbourne share house milieu (albeit about a decade after Garner's Nora cycled through those familiar streets), in other ways her world was completely alien to me. I shrank from the drug-taking, I was baffled by the partner-swapping, the casual falling in and out of bed together (which was actually much more emotionally fraught than the characters were striving for it to be), I had no experience of the relentless demands of motherhood. And everyone was so much cooler than me, it was intimidating.

Re-reading Monkey Grip now, with my share-house days far in the distant past, I think I understand the book much better. It helps to realise that the novel is a thinly fictionalised version of Garner's diaries from the time -- on the first reading, the kaleidoscope of characters made my head reel. Reading it as a diary is much more straightforward for some reason. However, there were many times when I longed to shake young Helen/Nora by the shoulders and beg her to give up on these selfish, self-absorbed men! One serious mistake by the film-makers was the casting of Colin Friels together with Noni Hazlehurst -- addict Javo is only twenty three in the book, nearly ten years younger than Nora, and this is an important dynamic of their relationship, one which I think the movie will struggle to reproduce. I say will because I can't actually remember much about the film; I'm going to re-watch it today.

Abandoned!

Sometimes a book is just not for you. I had heard a lot of praise for Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, and it won the Booker Prize in 2023; it was not too fat, and I was intrigued by the premise of the story, which charts the gradual disintegration of a Western democracy and the irresistible creep of tyranny. And I am, I was, interested in the story -- the progress of the narrative kept me reading for the first sixty pages, as Eilish's husband is arrested and the family's passport renewal is denied.

But then I stopped.

I was defeated by Lynch's writing style. Long run-on paragraphs stretching across several pages, almost no punctuation, no speech marks, even when there's more than one speaker. Maybe the fault is mine -- I read fast, I like to immerse myself in the text so it feels like swimming effortlessly through the story. With Prophet Song, I kept stumbling over the prose, I had to stop and go back and pick up the thread again. Maybe that was the author's intention? Perhaps the reader is supposed to slow down and reflect, rather than skimming across the surface of the story?

But in the end, I felt so frustrated by the reading experience that I decided not to persist. Lynch has won the Booker, I don't think my decision will cost him any readers, and there are so many more books I would rather be reading. I gave up.

Judy B's Books

A few years ago my mum's friend Judy gave me a box of her childhood books from the 1950s, some gorgeous Girls' Own annuals as well as school stories and assorted other novels. I gobbled up the annuals immediately but I only got around to reading some of the novels recently, and what a trip back in time they proved to be. None of the above volumes are real 'classics,' just ordinary stock shelf-fillers and Sunday School prizes, but they were a lot of fun to read.

White Holiday by Viola Bayley sees a young brother and sister invited on a snowy holiday in Switzerland befriend a young skiing champion who happens to be the great-grandson of a countess who has a couple of crooks on the trail of her lost emeralds... There are abductions, moonlight chases, attempted assassination, disguises and secrets galore for our young protagonists. Will and Otto get plenty of action but Rosamund, though plucky, faints several times and is described as 'modest' as well as 'extremely pretty' and doesn't have a lot of personality. Which doesn't prevent dashing Otto from falling in love with her... in a couple of years time, naturally.

Myrtle's Guest lulled me into a false sense of security by describing how Myrtle, from a humble family on Jersey, gets a summer job in a guesthouse. Then suddenly, boom, at the end of the third chapter, Jane Rogers springs a new character on us: God! 

Mrs Moisin would train her to be a good and tidy maid, but could she help the real Myrtle -- the Myrtle who was an immortal soul -- to be the best that she could be, the best that her Creator intended her to be?

Luckily for Myrtle's immortal soul, a lovely kind and generous Christian (English) family arrive at the guesthouse and bring her to Jesus. Phew!

The Highland School by Marjorie Taylor seems to have been written as Girl Guide propaganda, as the common thread through an eventful novel, as well as outrageous coincidences, is pride in the principles of Guidedom. Christine writes and acts in a play in front of a major London producer, faces down her fear of fire when the cottage she's staying in suddenly goes up in flames, and manages to find her missing amnesiac brother among some gypsies at a local fair in the middle of France -- oh, and did I mention that her best friend is the daughter of the famous scientist that her brother most wants to work for? The Highland School also introduced me to the concept of the 'Post Guide,' which I can't find any more information about, but seems to be something like a guide-by-correspondence for disabled girls? Christine's troop invite a disabled girl from the slums of Glasgow to join them on their camp, and of course Elspeth teaches Christine valuable lessons of courage and patience which stand her in good stead later on. And the burglar who breaks into Christine's house turns out to be Elspeth's father, who instantly repents and is able to get his old job back with Christine's family's help. Again, phew.

Nothing deep or literary here, but I got some good laughs and a bit of history from these books from yesteryear.

17 Years Later

 

I was waiting for months for this book on reserve at the local library, not just weeks -- so long, in fact, that I now can't remember where I heard about it (though its evident popularity assured me it would be worth waiting for). In the intervening time, I somehow got it onto my head that it was a non-fiction book, a true crime story, and I was quite startled when I eventually picked it up to discover that it's actually a novel.

J.P. Pomare has only been published for a few years but he's quickly become a crime writing sensation. 17 Years Later has as its central detective a crime podcaster (this seems to be becoming the sleuth type de jour, I've come across this idea several times now), an Australian ex-journalist who travels to New Zealand to investigate a long ago case involving the murder of a whole family, and Bill, their Maori chef, who may or may not have been wrongly imprisoned for the crime.

It was fun to read a murder mystery set in this part of the globe, and there are so many twists to the plot that I began to feel dizzy. It's fast-paced and full of tension, but not annoyingly convoluted, and Pomare does an excellent job in letting us see the story from different angles, squirming at the Primroses' condescending attitude to their local staff and the subtle Oz-Kiwi rivalry. Turns out I retrieved from the reserve shelf at the right time after all, 17 Years Later is a perfect summer read.

The Bee Sting

What a remarkable novel. I heard it recommended all last year and finally managed to borrow it from my local library, though I must confess I gulped when I saw the size of it -- 650 pages! These days a novel has to be pretty gripping to hold me for that long, and The Bee Sting was.

The novel centres on four members of an Irish family: mother, father, teenage son and daughter, and the story is told from the point of view of each in turn. The backdrop is horrible family dysfunction, the threat of violence, and climate change -- the summer is too hot and dry, the winter brings floods (this is the second Irish novel in a row I've read with an unnaturally hot summer). There is a mounting sense of impending dread, from which Murray pulls back each time, but the structure is very clever in that each section becomes shorter and shorter until it feels as if we are hurtling toward certain doom. Someone smarter than me pointed out that this is how the catastrophe of climate change also functions -- we experience a threat, we feel panic, but we survive, and we kid ourselves that we're safe... but the next wave is coming, and it's bigger and deadlier than the last, and one day it will be too late to escape.

From what I've said so far, you will gather that The Bee Sting is a bleak novel, and in many ways it is. But it's also rich and funny and shocking and beautiful, and though I'm still reeling from the final scenes, I'm so glad I went along for the ride. This is a novel that will stay with me for a long time.
 

We Are the Beaker Girls & Hetty Feather's Christmas

 I've been aware of Jacqueline Wilson for a long time, but it took a chapter of The Haunted Wood to prompt me to actually read a couple of her (many, many) books. They are aimed a bit younger than I would usually go for, and they are a very attractive package -- big print, nice short chapters, interspersed with charming illustrations by Nick Sharratt. 

Bolshie child-in-care Tracy Beaker has become a classic in the UK, and We Are the Beaker Girls features Tracy all grown up and with a daughter of her own, but still as bold and fiery as ever, and still involved in the care system, this time as a prospective foster parent herself. I really enjoyed the way Tracy and Jess gather a family around them in their new home, and the way Tracy, though she's an adult, is shown to be still growing and learning.

Hetty Feather's Christmas seems to be a kind of bonus story, a Christmas special, in a series about Hetty's life as a Victorian era foundling -- not an orphan, not abandoned, but a victim of a society that wouldn't allow her and her mother to be together. The cruel matron of the foundling hospital is contrasted with kind benefactress Miss Smith, who whisks Hetty away for a magical Christmas day with the artistic Rivers family. At least, it's fairly magical, but issues of class, gender and neuro-diversity are gently present to give the reader food for thought.

I can see why Jacqueline Wilson's books are so popular. They are effortlessly engaging, lively and very relatable, with ordinary kids who act up, are sometimes kind and sometimes thoughtless, lots of humour and a bit of action. It's a fabulous formula. They probably wouldn't have appealed to child-me -- I liked a bit of magic or some history in my reading, in fact I tended to shy away from 'modern' books (books I now read as historic fiction, ha), but Wilson's massive popularity speaks for itself.

The Haunted Wood

First non-fiction blockbuster read of 2025! After a review from the reluctant dragon, I arranged to receive Sam Leith's 'history of childhood reading,' The Haunted Wood, as a Christmas present. At 550 pages, this one is a blockbuster in the physical sense as well as in terms of enjoyment.

I admit I was slightly daunted to open the list of contents and see a number of chapters devoted to early childhood reading (that is, early in history) -- fairy tales, Aesop's fables, improving tales -- but Leith keeps this section short and sweet before plunging into my real area of interest: the books I've read myself.

The classics are well covered: Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Beatrix Potter. But Leith really hits his stride with what I suspect were the favourite books of his own UK childhood, as well as my own, focusing on twentieth century writers. I did have one quibble when he described Noel Streatfeild as churning out a whole series of 'Shoes' books after the success of Ballet Shoes, though in fact only Tennis Shoes really followed that template. Several of her books were rebranded later by publishers to capitalise on Ballet Shoes -- for example, Curtain Up became Theatre Shoes. But that's being very pedantic.

Most of my favourite authors are discussed here: Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, Philippa Pearce, CS Lewis, Lucy M Boston. Even Elizabeth Goudge gets a mention, albeit in a quote from JK Rowling (there's a level-headed and insightful chapter on Harry Potter). Leith rounds out the book with a quick survey of some of the best picture books. 

Even at 500+ pages, this can only be a partial overview, but I thoroughly enjoyed Leith's balance of discussing stories, authors, and broader social context. It's sent me scurrying to the library to hunt out some authors who had passed me by (like Jacqueline Wilson). The Haunted Forest is a gorgeous brick of delights. I can't wait to lend it around to my kidlit friends.
 

The Ministry of Time

 The first blockbuster read of 2025! I was waiting months for Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time to arrive on the reserves shelf at my local library (it was always out at the Athenaeum, too) and now I understand why. Sometimes these very popular reads end up being slightly underwhelming, but not in this case. I loved it, and I gobbled it down.

The Ministry of Time had me at time travel, honestly, but there's much more to it than that. The premise is that in our near future, the UK government has discovered the secret of time travel, and used it to bring five 'travellers' into our time. These are all people who were about to die in their own timelines anyway, so their sudden absence won't change history -- a plague survivor, a victim of the French Revolution's guillotine, a soldier from the Western Front, an Arctic explorer. The story centres on the latter, a real man called Graham Gore, retrieved from 1847, and his never-named 'bridge,' our narrator, whose job it is to help him adjust to the twenty-first century. 

There is a lot of fun with the time travellers' difficulties with modern customs. There is a pretty spicy love story. There is a thrilling plot. I might have slightly lost track of the complexities of the story towards the end, but this in no way impaired my enjoyment of this terrific, clever, more-ish novel, which also comments on outsider status, racism, family and history in interesting and subtle ways.

Mean Streak

When the robodebt Royal Commission was running in 2022-3, my husband and I became a bit obsessed with following the livestream of the proceedings. Often we didn't fully understand exactly who a particular witness was, or what part they'd played in setting up or perpetuating the scheme; sometimes we found the counsel's line of questioning hard to follow, or had trouble disentangling the self-justifications, half-lies and fudges produced by the witnesses.

We weren't directly affected by robodebt, though my sister receives Centrelink payments and my husband works for the public service (the Tax Office was tangentially involved in the saga, as the source of the data that the department of Human Services relied on to produce their 'debt' figures, and it was possible at one time that my husband's boss might be called to give evidence). I guess we had just enough skin in the game to be appalled and fascinated. During the sittings, I relied on Rick Morton's tweets to decipher what was going on and explain the broader context, and now he has produced Mean Streak, which sorts out all the confusions of the out-of-order evidence and sets out a brutally clear chronological account of how robodebt evolved, its cruel consequences, and the persistence of a few activists and lawyers that finally brought it crashing down.

Mean Streak is not an easy read, though Morton does his best to leaven the material with personal interviews, wry asides and even the odd joke. But he is furious, and exhausted, and it shows. A few individuals (given a right of reply at the end of the book) emerge as merciless architects of a scheme that targeted the most vulnerable in our society, though they all deny any wrong-doing, and I suppose most of them actually believe that they were doing the right thing -- stopping 'fraud' (though welfare fraud is actually vanishingly small), clawing back 'overpayments' from undeserving bludgers to be returned to 'honest taxpayers' (hm, I have another whole set of views about that categorisation...) But people died. And still no one has been held accountable.

Robodebt was a horrific, shameful episode of Australian public life, and I applaud Rick Morton for his tireless, unflinching examination of the story, and his faithful chronicling of it. He says working on this story has made him sick, literally, and I'm not surprised. But there are still shining moments among the dishonesty and lack of compassion -- a lowly worker who tried to draw her superior's attention to the unfairness of the scheme, an online activist drawn into protest almost against their will. There is still hope, and there still are decent people doing their best, people who care.
 

The Lady and the Unicorn

The very observant reader of this blog might have noticed that I started Rumer Godden's second novel, The Lady and the Unicorn, months ago, and then set it aside for a long time. The reason is quite a daft one: I peeked at the last page and thought I saw something that indicated the death of a little dog. Immediately I shut the book and couldn't bring myself to pick it up again until just before Christmas. This was even before we found out that our own little dog won't be with us for much longer -- maybe it was a presentiment of doom, which would be quite fitting for this novel, which is haunted by ghosts and visions, premonitions and misguided guesses.

It's was Godden's third novel, Black Narcissus, that brought her real success, but The Lady and the Unicorn is a beautiful, sad little tale that contains much of the trademark Godden atmosphere and subject matter. An Anglo-Indian family, caught awkwardly between two communities, live in part of a decrepit mansion, occupied by other families and their landlord. They struggle for money and the white father gambles away anything he finds. Newly arrived from England, Stephen Bright is captivated by the shy younger daughter, Rosa, and by the romance of her dilapidated home, until pressure from his friends and family, and misunderstandings inexorably drive them apart.

The Lady and the Unicorn such a sad novel, but not in the way I first imagined. It's a perfectly constructed ghost story, a mystery, a love story, a keen observation of family and class, a little gem of a novel.
 

Craft for a Dry Lake

Kim Mahood's first book, Craft For a Dry Lake, was much awarded when it was published in 2000, but somehow it passed me by. I came to Mahood's writing via her other books, Position Doubtful and Wandering With Intent, but Craft For a Dry Lake really sets the foundation for the later books and fills in much of the detail of Mahood's early life that has led her to where she is now.

The influence of Mahood's late father, Joe, looms large over these pages. Kim was raised in the Tanami Desert, though her family later moved to Queensland, and the struggle she has returned to the desert to face is rooted deep in her childhood. This land belonged to her family, but it's not their land (the cattle station has been returned to Aboriginal ownership). All her life, she has worn her unusual childhood with both pride and otherness -- yet returning here after many years, she is unsure how to integrate her memories, her sense of self, with the intellectual knowledge that this place was never really hers. She is pulled back to the familiar places, and yet deeply conscious of how alien is her presence there.

It was particularly interesting to read about this inner conflict, because I was aware from the later writing how she has resolved it -- she spends part of the year in the desert, living and making art with the First Nations community, and part of it back in the city, where she can live out the other part of her identity. Mahood has a nuanced, complex understanding of the intensely complicated relations between white and Black Australia, between history and present and future, between personal experience and the weight of the past, and I hope she keeps writing about it. I'm hungry for more.
 

Reading Roundup 2024

Okay, so it's that time again, time to cast a look back at what I read over the last year. In 2024, I turned to my bookshelves and revisited a lot of old childhood favourites: Joan Aiken, Penelope Lively, Susan Cooper, Susan Coolidge, Antonia Forest, Mary Norton, Diana Wynne Jones. This will no doubt account for a preponderance of British lady authors in the re-read category.

Kids'/YA v Adult

As usual, due to my patented three-books-at-a-time reading system (one kids'/YA, one adult fiction, one adult non-fiction), I read about one third kids' books and two thirds books for adults. Though as the kids' books are a bit quicker to get through, it's actually just over a third.

Gender

Sorry, blokes, no attempt at even-handedness this year at all! Lots of lady authors, a handful of non-binary authors or books with mixed male and female writer, and... some gentlemen.

Fiction v non-fiction

No surprises here, as usual, a split of about one third non-fiction to two thirds fiction (I hardly ever read a non-fiction children's book.)

Book source

I made good use of libraries this year! About half my reading came from either my local library (where I tend to reserve new releases) or from the Athenaeum library in the city, where I love to browse the shelves. The Ath doesn't hold reserves for long, and it's not always convenient for me to come in and pick them up when they arrive, so I'd rather relax with some old books from there. I borrowed nine books from friends, and 24 came from my secondhand stash, which is still mysteriously as high as it was at the start of the year, despite my vow to pause buying. I'm not very good at keeping resolutions. It's satisfying to see that I used the Ath so much, it's well worth the membership. No e-books this year because my Kindle has died.

Author origin

Weirdly, this was the first year for a while that I gave up consciously trying to read authors with more diverse backgrounds, and quite by chance I ended up reading a reasonable spread of origins: German, Canadian, Irish and Turkish, as well as the usual mountain of UK authors and a good chunk of Australians. This year I separated out First Nations authors for the first time.

Highlights

I very much enjoyed my trawl through old favourite children's books, especially The Little White Horse and Joan Aiken's Dido Twite stories.

In adult fiction, the standouts were Fiona McFarlane's Highway 13, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Alison Goodman's The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, and Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman.

I read lots of amazing non-fiction in 2024, including Helen Garner's The Season, Nova Weetman's Love, Death and Other Scenes and Would That Be Funny? by Lorin Clarke (all Melbourne women). David Marr's Killing for Country was devastating. Rumer Godden's autobiographical memoirs, A Time to Dance, A Time to Weep and A House With Four Rooms were absolutely beautiful. Dodie Smith's memoirs were very different in tone and moreishly funny. Ursula Le Guin's essay collection, Dreams Must Explain Themselves, gave me lots to chew on. Isabella Tree's Wilding gave me hope that nature can repair itself, given a chance. Inga Simpson's Understory was very moving, as was Kathryn Moore's book about death, With the End in Mind.